Testimony - Tony Palmer's Story of Shostakovich / Ben Kingsley
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Features
• Color
• DVD-Video
• NTSC
In Theaters : November, 1988
DVD Release : 25 July, 2006 |
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Testimony - Tony Palmer's Story of Shostakovich / Ben Kingsley Customer Reviews
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In the Eye of the Beholder
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Tony Palmer appears to have made a documentary on just about every musician in the world, and generally gets high ratings. My first purchase was "England, My England -- The Story of Henry Purcell" (151 minutes). All I saw were actors walking around in old clothes with a few snippets of Purcell's music in the background. Unfortunately, I didn't learn from the experience: I bought the Shostakovich documentary!
"Testimony", supposedly based on Solomon Volkov's book about Shostakovich (which I read), is much in the same mode as the Purcell documentary: a lot of slow, dark shadows moving around groaning, mostly Ben Kingsley as Dmitri. The most interesting part of the production was some old newsreal footage from the Soviet Union. Although the packaging claims that the documentary contains "extracts" from 11 Shostakovich symphonies, a violin and a piano concerto. two string quartets, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Jazz Suite 1 & 2, and Michelangelo Sonnets, you couldn't prove it by me. In 2 1/2 hrs (151") one COULD include entire movements of several pieces, but it didn't happen that way.
If you are a Palmer fan, then nothing I say here will discourage you. But if you expect to hear music in a very long documentary about music, then, having now been stung twice by this series, I feel I have earned the right to suggest that you might spend your money more profitably on a symphony (or 2?) by Mahler or Bruckner.
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Testimony - Tony Palmer's Story of Shostakovich / Ben Kingsley dvd movie.